[nolta]

I wonder how many people are killed per alert?

These alerts (usually AMBER alerts) are sent to millions of people, accompanied by a loud and startling siren.

You can imagine all sorts of "one-in-a-million" events. The surgeon woken in the middle of the night, who can't get back to sleep and makes a mistake the next day. The startled roofer falling off a ladder. Etc.

[tenpies]

Not even that, the deaths and injuries are immediate for drivers. Canada implemented this in the worst way possible so that any alert gets the highest alert setting possible (Presidential: what would normally be reserved for an imminent attack) - bypassing silence, do not disturb, and any volume or device setting. So Imagine a truck driver at 3 am being suddenly startled by the blaring alert and then scrambling to shut up the noise.

This will almost certainly be one of those things that future generations will look at us and wonder "wait they did what?".

Unfortunately the current dialog in Canada about this is "why do you hate children?" if you do anything but genuflect towards our AMBER alert system.

[ghaff]

In the US, I assumed most people turn AMBER alerts off on their phones. Some people seem to get mad about people disabling them but some people get mad at just about everything.

[slimed]

I highly doubt "most people" even know how to do this.

[MiddleEndian]

Most people I know forget about their existence but disable them as soon as they get one on a new phone.

[zenexer]

I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone near me in the US who has even thought to disable it. We might get one alert every few years.

[ghaff]

I used to get them once a month or so. I disabled them.

[toper-centage]

As with most good things, if it's abused, it stops working as intended.

[Deinumite]

I don't believe this is true. I received these alerts this morning, but as my phone is only on vibrate it did not produce any audio.

[Scoundreller]

I think if it's set to silent/vibrate, it won't generate audio on most phones.

But as I'm on-call for my organization, that's not an option.

[Spooky23]

Half the truck drivers are futzing with their phone anyway, so I wouldn’t worry about an emergency broadcast causing mayhem. There’s certainly no evidence of alert induced carnage.

I think that these things are annoying, and since they are controlled at the state/provincial/territorial/major metro level, there’s going to be a bell curve of competence. (With the bottom being Hawaii where a single operator with a defective control panel was able to send a incoming ballistic missile attack warning)

[MiddleEndian]

>any alert gets the highest alert setting possible (Presidential: what would normally be reserved for an imminent attack) - bypassing silence, do not disturb, and any volume or device setting

Not that I was looking to move, but Canada is no longer on my list of countries I'd be willing to live in.

[na85]

The Canadian government is pretty much uniformly incompetent as an institution.

I honestly can't think of a single thing in my lifetime they haven't bungled.

[soperj]

Not going into Iraq.

[smabie]

Canada did get involved: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_and_the_Iraq_War

[nitwit005]

I've been in a car when four cell phones started blaring, and it definitely startled the shit out of me. I'm sure people have crashed as a result.

I fully expect to see a "killed by amber alert" news story, because it just seems inevitable.

[corry]

I'm also worried this will add to NIMBY re: nuclear power.

Not a good look for the entire province to be momentarily scared shitless about a potential incoming meltdown completely unnecessarily.

I'm in Ontario, and my first half asleep thought after being jarringly woken by this was "grab the kids and start driving south". Then I remembered I'm like 100km+ away.

[AlohaFractal]

The signal these events give off is really weak, but with enough events the question could be statistically resolved by looking for an effect on death rates. Interesting.

[starpilot]

Probably zero. You can imagine all sorts of things that don't happen.